Gizmodo breaks down some of the design reasons to switch to sans-serif, including that the logo scales better on the range of screen sizes from where Google services are now consumed, and that the new logo chews up far less bandwidth to load.

Users connecting to Google over low-bandwidth links previously saw a slightly different logo than those on higher-bandwidth connections – mainly because the old logo was around “14,000 bytes” in size.

The company has now been able to build “a special variant of our full-colour logo that is only 305 bytes".

“The old logo, with its intricate serifs and larger file size, required that we serve a text-based approximation of the logo for low bandwidth connections,” Google Design said.

“The new logo’s reduced file size avoids this workaround and the consistency has tremendous impact when you consider our goal of making Google more accessible and useful to users around the world, including the next billion.”

It’s not just the full ‘Google’ logo that has been redesigned but also the shortened blue ‘g’, which has been replaced by a four-colour capital ‘G’.

“Like any new logo, Google’s latest creation will look odd for the first minute or so. But all you have to do is go back and look at the old—okay, yesterday’s—sans serif logo to see, yeah, it really was time for an update,” the magazine said.

One thing that had designers and technology commentators abuzz was a photo that appeared to reveal other logo design candidates.

Google Design said it kicked off the redesign process at an “intense, week-long design sprint” in New York earlier this year.

“With the cutting room floor littered with hundreds of hours of design work, we set out with a few directions that excited us,” the design team said.